Evhe--Ouatchi: Un'estetica del Disordine/Une esthetique du disordre.

Evhe--Ouatchi: Un'estetica del Disordine/Une esthetique du disordre edited by Giovanna Parodi da Passano Milan: Centro Studi Archeologia Africana, 2004. 163 pp., 158 ill. Price 30.

An exhibition of power objects connected to the several vodu cults of southeastern Togo was organized jointly by the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano and by the Centro Studi Archeologia Africana di Milano from February 26-June 6, 2004. Its catalogue includes a neatly organized series of essays introduced by Marc Auge, the noted author of Le Dieu Objet (1988).

Editor Giovanna Parodi da Passano's leading essay raises two main points. Firstly, she conducts an historically and anthropologically well-informed discussion of both the concept and the term feticcio (fetish). Her position runs against the grain of Anglo-American scholarship, which has, even in recent years, argued against the use of the term in publications that, in their sheer volume and number, seem to prove that the problem simply refuses to go away; for it entails fundamental and thorny issues of a theoretical as well as methodological nature (e.g. Shelton 1995). Against reductionist trends, Parodi da Passano picks up a line of thought permeating "Continental" anthropology since at least Jean Pouillon's Fetiches sans fetichisme of 1975. She argues that the concept of "the fetish," once expurgated of its colonial overtones in a "de-fetishized" approach to certain African cultural expressions, is still needed, in that it designates a specific constellation of conceptual, cognitive, symbolical, and psychological elements made visible in the kind of material culture expressed by vodu and similar religious packages (on this matter, see Poppi 2006).

The second element of interest in the essay consists of an attempt to describe the specific aesthetics of vodu objects in terms of the effort to master the invisible forces active within a variety of fields of experience by mustering them within concrete objects--the manufactured, visible, and tangible body of vodu. In this sense, "the aesthetic" as such is primary and constitutive and not simply "symbolical" and "representational." It is the hard material form alone that is capable of overcoming the protean, phenomenologically unstable, and cognitively slippery experience of the vodu. "Giving a body" circumvents and locates, focuses and "plants" the vodu, otherwise left to wander perilously, an angry, disembodied soul in search of victims where and when worshippers are lacking. Here the comparison with Suzanne Blier's African Vodun (1995) is almost de rigueur. While this cannot be pursued further for reasons of space, it ought to be pointed out that the two analyses complement each other in that both privilege an understanding of vodu objects from a strongly psychological point of view: Blier's being more intimate and person-centered, while that of Parodi da Passano is directed to a more "objective aesthetic."

The essay by Alessandra Brivio expands on some of the general themes introduced in the opening essay. The most engaging part consists of a detailed analysis of the notion of the person--as experienced in the cultural area in question--in relationship to the array of entities, forces, and fields of power--all variously in and out of focus--that constitute the phenomenon of vodu. Here the ethnography is detailed and to the point, as it enjoys the freshness (as well as, occasionally, the hesitations) of a work in progress (the author is still conducting field research). The central thesis is that amongst the Evhe the notion of the person is that of a composite being within which an ever-changing constellation of forces straddling both visible and invisible phenomenologies of experience finds a field of action whose shape--past, present, and future--is negotiable and never to be taken for granted. Brivio's detailed account of such forces, fields, and negotiations is convincing in its complexity and nonsystemic approach to what are, in the experience of the present reviewer too, almost intractable ethnographic problems. Perhaps some will find her interpretation of the data less compelling, for it comes close, in its somewhat reiterated formulations, to the description of all-too-postmodern personalities. The discovery of multiplicity versus the (pretended) unity of Modernist Western Man does not need now to be exported back to the place where the notion of the heteronymous Primitive African Man was once formulated in order to reinstate an improbable--and universalistic--'equivalence" between Euro-America and Africa.

A comparative approach is pursued by Albert de Surgy, the specialist of Evhe religion, in the third essay of the catalogue. The problem that he addresses, in a nutshell, is whether, in the light of the multisided composition of the person among "les Africains" (a generalization that fortunately disappears as the essay sails into ethnographic blue waters), they ought therefore to be considered less "individualistic" than their European (and--I guess, but one never knows these days--American) counterparts. De Surgy is definite in this respect: "Most certainly an African reckons that supernatural forces dominate him. He feels that he is primordially acted by them and that he is not immediately responsible for his actions" (p. 107, my translation). However, de Surgy plants the doubt of the comparative equivalence, meant to turn the tables over and redress the imbalance: "Nevertheless, is the subject of a modern society not himself dominated and directed, if he does not guard himself, by obscure psychic forces?" (ibid.). His answer is, of course, in the positive. Ultimately, de Surgy argues for a "transcendence absolue du sujet" (p. 112) in Africa, due to the very possibility of a variety of choices in negotiating one's life trajectory with conflicting super natural powers. This would compare favorably with "Modern Man's" subjection to impersonal bureaucracies, obscure political manipulations, and all the determinations preventing him from being an "absolutely transcendent subject," unlike his luckier counterpart who can--at least, as it were--manipulate the fetishes. One cannot help thinking that we are here in the presence of yet another version of the old story that has haunted the darkest nights of the Western intellect since Michel de Montaigne had thoughts on cannibals. Or, more modestly, of poor comparative methodology answering hastily formulated problems.

The last essay in the collection brings us back to the strong point of the volume: its ethnographic accuracy. The sharp and short, linguistically competent piece by Bruno Gilli addresses the problem of the etymology of vodu. His conclusion is based on a variety of conversations with informants of different social standings and--finally--points in the direction of a cognitively complex and culturally variously textured and nuanced notion of the hidden and yet revealed, of "that which is buried in a hole and yet talked about in secrecy," experienced obscurely and by the same token clarified in the knowledge of initiates.

This notable contribution to the literature on vodu is capped by a wide selection of black-and-white pictures of vodu objects compiled by Gigi Pezzoli, of the Centro di Archeologia Africana di Milano, complete with description and, for a much-welcome change, detailed provenance of the objects.

Auge, M. 1988. Le Dieu Objet. Paris: Flammarion.

Blier, S. Preston. 1995. African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Poppi, C. 2006. "Wonders Taken for Signs: Rethinking the 'Fetish." In Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype With in Images and Other Objects, eds. R. Maniura and R. Shepherd. London: Ashgate.

Pouillon, J. 1975. Fetiches sans Fetichisme. Paris: Maspero.

Shelton, A. 1995. Fetishism: Visualising Power and Desire. London: The South Bank Centre.